The temperature gauge on my pickup this morning said this.

–20

That’s negative twenty.

Twenty below zero.

Sub, sub, zero.

Two digits below zero.

And that was without the windchill factor.

Do you know what -20 feels like if you include the windchill?

Well it sure as hell doesn’t feel like Tuesday. You know, way back when I was in Florida.

You know what the temperature is in Florida today?

Shit.

How’s a person expected to survive that sort of shift in the atmosphere?

I woke up one day to 75 and sunny, got on a plane without socks and landed in a blizzardy tundra with 30 mile-per-hour gusts of blowing snow that dropped the temperature to a nice even -15 or so.

Sockless.

That’s nearly a 100 degree temperature drop in a mere 8 hours.

Do you know what 100 degrees colder than 75 and sunny feels like?

It feels like blood freezing in your veins.

It feels like icicle eyeballs.

It feels like razor sharp nipples.

It feels like burning cold skin.

It feels like every swear word you can form on your lips in the five seconds before your mouth freezes shut.

It makes you question your place in life, the level of sanity you possess to have become a person who choses to live in a place that spends a solid two to three weeks a year trying to freeze your internal organs.

No one’s lungs are freezing in Florida. I’m just saying…

Oh, I know, we’re a hardy lot of people up here. We’re sort of proud of that. We eat a lot of meat and potatoes. We put big dumplings in our soup. We roll out noodles and smother them with heavy sauces.

We deep fat fry shit.

We’ve got meat on our bones.

But there aren’t enough noodles in the world, not enough gravy, no ass big enough to protect a person from a weatherman warning that today, today friends, it’s only going to be -20, but you know what, it’s gonna feel like -45.

Henry, I love ya, but shut it.

Just. Shut. It.

Because at some point on the devil’s side of 0 degrees, it just doesn’t matter.

No.

So don’t bother with such a specific warning Henry. Just tell us to wear seven sweaters under our giant, full-body jackets that drag on the ground.

And then laugh because we all know that seven sweaters and a giant jacket ain’t helping anyone out here.

We’re all just idiots.

Freezing cold idiots.

Popsicle people walking around wearing seven sweaters while our eyelids freeze to our eyeballs when really, we should all just move to Florida.

-20.

Shit I’m cold.